In France, a Move to Limit Off-the-Clock Work Emails | Hacker News Reader

In France, a Move to Limit Off-the-Clock Work Emails

nytimes.com

19 pointsapeconmyth19 comments

Oh, come on, not those unchecked facts on HN, please...

This thing is about an agreement signed between some unions and a group of employers in the consulting business. This is not a law, this is far from generic, and this does not apply to millions of people, but at most 200k.

The agreement just reminds an 'obligation to disconnect' to preserve the daily rest period of 11 hours for workers with independent contracts... The agreement does not even mention an hour...

Indeed, some people (with a specific contract) in consulting (notably management or strategy) do not follow the hours limitations (and notably not the 35h): they are working a defined numbers of days per year without a duration limit every day... Therefore, this agreement just reminds the right (and need) to disconnect every day.

Btw, even if you stop at 6pm, 11hours gives a day starting at 5am. Most of the people in the consulting industry in France I know are more often home at 10-11pm than at 6pm...

And finally, this is a reminder, not a law, without any actual enforcement...

RTFA before bemoaning it, your criticism is clearly stated in the second paragraph.

Keep in mind France has one of the highest GDP per hour worked.

We have a lot to learn from them.

I've always wondered how much this is due to culture and statistics. I guess the data for these stats comes from surveys, and I can imagine in America the culture tends to overstate hours worked whereas in France the reverse is true as there is instead a sense of taking pride in not working all the time.

Source?

I don't understand how ISPs, colo providers, transit operators, power plants, and other 24x7 infrastructure providers can function in environments like this.

Unplanned incidents shouldn't happen regularly, but on the off chance they do, I can't imagine being caught between screwing my customers vs. breaking the law. Talk about a rock and a hard place...

Maybe in a country with better work/life balance, customers are more understanding and willing to wait until tomorrow to get their widgets.

Sounds like an orthogonal problem. Even in France, the law doesn't say you can't work at midnight, just that you can't (usually) work more than N hours/week. You can hire people for non-standard shifts, just not "overwork" them (as defined under the law).

Just like how in blue law states, you can work on Sunday for jobs that need 24/7 support: hospitals, police, infrastructure.

As often the truth got a bit distorted through translation and re-reporting. Unfortunately it's getting a bit late for me to explain in details but hopefully if you can read this article it should clear things up:

http://www.lemonde.fr/les-decodeurs/article/2014/04/11/la-le...

In short, not all workers are concerned. For instance I work as a developer for a french company but I'm not bound by the "Syntec", so it does not concern me.

I think in France, it would be probably just acceptable to relax and not worry about having no internet or email access if an ISP or data center goes out. It's a different culture - and they value very different things.

You mean to say you don't understand how those lazy socialists surrender monkeys could have the common sense to make exceptions?

I mean seriously, you really think they haven't thought of that?

The first thing, this is not a law. It is some agreement between unions or something like that and employers. The agreement itself is not about employees, it is about contractors. Contractors in France do not have 35 hours a week work time limit, they can work as much hours as they want.

Also, the agreement does not says they can not check mails after some hour, the employer must give them possibility to disconnect for 12 consecutive hours. You can expect them to be available for remaining 12 hours.

So, all you need is either employee on call or two contractor to switch turn-offable times.

You schedule someone (or hire a service) to provide 24/7 coverage.

If someone is required to respond outside of normal business hours, compensating PTO is provided.

Actually, I'd be strongly partial to that time off being granted at a multiple scale, much as overtime and double-overtime are rated. If I'm called on to respond outside of core hours (and am not normally scheduled for those hours), I get 1.5x time compensation. If it's between midnight and 8am, weekends, or holidays, it's 2x.

From Frank Herbert's Dune, there's the Fremen desert water compensation principle of 10x price -- the idea being that if you create an obligation of others to share their very limited water through loss, stillsuit damage, etc., you must pay them back 10 times what they provided you.

See generally: http://dune.wikia.com/wiki/Stillsuit

I'm also very much increasingly a fan of having engineering, not just ops, included on pager rotation:

• It increases pager coverage, and reduces any one person's pager obligations. Simply having pager anticipation is a mental burden after a while.

• It creates a stronger incentive for response procedures: what are the expected obligations of response staff, what's considered sufficient effort, what's the escalation policy, who is expected to participate, what are consequences of failure to respond?

• It makes engineering more aware of the consequences of their actions: is insufficient defensive engineering causing outages (say, unlimited remote access to expensive operations), are alerts, notification mails, and/or monitoring/logging obscuring rather than revealing anomalous conditions? Are mechanisms for adjusting, repairing, updating, and/or restarting systems complex and/or failure prone themselves?

My experience at one site, where I was a recent staff member (and hence unfamiliar with policies, procedures, and capabilities), systems went down starting at 2am, I was unable to raise engineering or my manager, and the response the next staff meeting to my observation of this was pretty much "so what" did not endear me to the organization (I left it shortly afterward).

http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2014/04/10/debunked_fran...

The work-at-home environment brings a lot of questions to the whole employer-employee relationship and work environment. For example, my wife works at a US government job where they have the ability to work from home 3 days a week and "liberal leave" for snow days. If someone is scheduled to work from home on a snow day, should they still work? What if their kids can't get to day care, and who will shovel the sidewalk?

Snow days or pre-arrange at-home work periods are not "off-the-clock".

Working 9-5 and being expected to respond to a 10pm email is off-the-clock.

If it snows and you have kids at home, it's pretty hard to work. Especially if you have meetings.

Fair point, though I'd argue that this is an independent issue from on vs. off the clock.

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